Ian Taylor: Any doubts about Dame Jacinda’s brand power are gone

Wednesday, 23 July 2025

Sir Ian Taylor is the founder and managing director of Animation Research. You can read his letter to Ardern here. Stuff also published a range of replies here.

OPINION: If I had any doubts of the power of the brand that has been built around Dame Jacinda, they were well and truly put to rest following my open letter that featured in Stuff recently.

This was not a letter I had written lightly.

Since Dame Jacinda made the call to leave New Zealand to take up residency in the United States, I hadn’t written a single article about her, or the choices she made. My focus remained here, in the country she left behind.

In her absence, I have written about issues such as child poverty, pay equity, school lunches, the Treaty Principles Bill, the opportunities for New Zealand around climate change and sustainability, the need to address the rising cost of electricity, our youth suicide rates, and a health system that is failing both our frontline workers and those they take care of.

I even wrote an open letter to Winston Peters suggesting that if ‘woke’ meant being enlightened and open to listening, then I would be proud to wear the label. Winston replied the same day, inviting me to lunch for a chat. I hope to find Shane Jones there wearing a “Woke and Proud” hat.

But then Dame Jacinda launched her memoir A Different Kind of Power, and she was back, front and centre in almost every bookstore in the country. I had recently appeared before the Covid Royal Commission of Inquiry, an exercise that had me revisiting heart breaking stories that had been shared with me, during the second lockdown, by people who had been left out of the waka, who had not felt the kindness.

For me those stories did not sit comfortably with the slick, polished memoir that had gone on sale around the world. I had an opinion on that and took the opportunity to share it.

Of course, I expected feedback. What I had not expected was that the open letter would become one of the most read and commented pieces in Stuff’s history.

The responses were passionate, divided and many were simply angry that I had questioned a legacy that I believed was built off the back of sacrifices made by an entire nation, rather than a single person.

A person who had the undeniable skills to define the message of who we were as a nation, but it was our message none the less.

The response on social media was also extraordinary, the second largest I’ve ever received.

Fittingly, the most viewed post remains one from the pandemic, acknowledging the selfless decision of three of our team members made 5 hours prior to the second lockdown.

When government officials ruled their work in our Dunedin-based studio as “non-essential,” barring them from travelling from their place of residence to our deserted office, they made a call. They shifted their place of residence - from their flat to our office.

That act, technically compliant, entirely safe, and essential to our ongoing business, exposed the flaws in what we were being told daily from “the single source of truth”. To save lives we had to put people’s livelihoods on hold. ‘Be kind’ and ‘we are all in this together’ was no longer resonating as it once did.

And then, something special happened. Dunedin residents heard what they were doing and began dropping meals at the door. Others took their laundry. He waka eke noa, we truly were all in this together and kindness flowed naturally from ordinary New Zealanders.

But what struck me most was that more than a year had passed since the first lockdown and this second “short sharp” version that eventually extended to more than 100 days in Auckland, costing the country more than $8 billion, and upending countless lives.

This was when I started the open letters to the Prime Minister. They weren’t aggressive, they weren’t ‘whingy,’ they were a genuine offer of help from “The Reserve Benches.”

Whilst the response from government was almost non-existent, an organisation called The Cross Sector Border Group contacted me.

This group was made up of business leaders, health specialists, scientists, hotel operators, logistical experts, tourism organisations and health technology companies. They too had found it impossible to get through the ‘single source of truth’ barricade that had been set up.

It was this group that backed my “151 Off the Bench Self-isolation Trial”. A trial designed to explore how we might get people in, and out, of New Zealand safely, using New Zealand technologies that had been overlooked by the government.

The Royal Commission has all the information and evidence from that trial, and it will be up to them to decide what, if anything, can be learned from the work of The Cross Sector Border Group and others who stepped up to help with the trial.

For anyone interested, you will find in these links the EY Report on the trial, along with a separate proposal we shared with certain Ministers and MBIE.

New Zealand’s natural advantages, squandered?

As an island nation, at the bottom of the world, we had the advantage of closing our borders early in the pandemic, a move that drew global praise and made our Prime Minister a celebrated figure of calm kindness.

What’s overlooked is that other Pacific Island nations did even better. Samoa kept Covid out for 21 months after New Zealand’s first case, Tonga for 20, and the Cook Islands for almost two years. They protected their people with decisive border closures and strict quarantine. They were kind too, but none of their leaders are now on the global speaking circuit being applauded for their wisdom and empathy.

In case you were wondering who those leaders were at the time; Samoa’s Prime Minister was Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, Tonga’s was PohivaTu’i’onetoa and the Cook Island’s was Henry Puna.

Some may argue we can’t compare New Zealand to smaller Pacific nations, but we’re a small nation too. Just five million people, no land borders and, at the time, a single autonomous government that had complete control of the messaging.

We had everything working in our favour: geography, control, and time. Those advantages remain, and they are our greatest assets in any future crisis. We should be looking at how we use them to do what Kiwis do best. Think outside the box.

After the first lockdown we sat on our laurels. Let’s not do that again.

Empathy should never be a substitute for strategy. While Dame Jacinda earned praise abroad, at home we were left waiting. Waiting between lockdowns, between waves, between decisions. There was no real plan, so when Covid returned, it found a country exhausted, divided, and unprepared. That division wasn’t caused by the virus; it was caused by a vacuum. It’s a division that clearly remains today, long after Dame Jacinda has left the building.

If we are going to come together as a country with a strategy for a potential new pandemic, then we must be willing to talk honestly about what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how we ensure that next time there is more than a “single source of truth” at the table.

Perhaps the model is already there. The Cross Sector Border Group.

If the past few years taught us anything, it’s that pandemic planning is too important to be left to politics. This isn’t about left or right. It’s about the right way of doing things. We need a plan shaped by expertise, not headlines.

Science, health, logistics, business, all working together. The Cross Sector Border Group showed what’s possible when politics steps back and people step up.

Maybe that’s where we start. All rowing the waka in the same direction.

Let’s do this. Now!

At the time of writing his open letter to Jacinda Sir Ian was overseas and had assumed that New Zealand had been included as part of Dame Jacinda’s world promotional tour. He apologises for that assumption and we have modified his article accordingly.